Tagged with zines

C's full-color handwritten and illustrated mini- 24-hourish perzine depicts her winter solstice day-in-the-life. She does a holiday craft project, but is unsuccessful at luring her son to participate--no Norman Rockwell memories for Emiliano! The next page is colored in saffron to match some Buddhist monks Celia saw waiting on the el train platform with her. She goes on to list and draw things she saw and heard in her travels that day and the contents of the single bag of stuff she bought at Whole Foods that set her back more than $80. There are also little anecdotes, music-inspired memories, and train haiku (morning meal is a / half gallon of Kemp's milk and / a "shut the fuck up").

Oh, Katie. I love your zines so much and the latest issue of White Elephants possibly even the most of all, because it's your most personal. Like much personal writing, zines can be full of complaints, insecurity, and calling people out on their evil ways, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's rather nice to read a mostly happy zine. The framework of WE4 is Katie's descriptions of her yard sale & flea market shopping, but as she asks near the end "Is this zine even about yard sales anymore?" It once was, and probably will be again, but for issue 4, something happens that eclipses Katie's joy over finding weird textbooks to repurpose into stationery, knickknacks with the previous owners' history attached or imagined, and vintage clothing items whose worth or potential can be ferreted out only by artisan shoppers such as herself. What Katie finds in this zine is love, revealing a little bit more about it with each section.

I loved this issue of QZAP:META from the old skool looking front cover photo of sailors making out to the anthemic back cover drawing of a large naked women by Mara Schnookums proclaiming "Any sex I have is queer sex any zine I make is a queer zine." Nerdslut Milo Miller's introduction lays out what it is to record one's life and struggles in zines and to preserve them in libraries and archives. Ze identifies the Queer Zine Archive Project, QZAP, as "part of a vast Yellow Submarine fleet of libraries, archives, and infoshops that all recognize the importance of saving and sharing populist and underground media." Ze makes me feel so proud to be part of that! The essays in the zine ride the activist/academic line in the most delicious way. Plus there's art. What's not to love?

Just when I'm getting jaded about zines, reading and cataloging 50 of them a week, it's nice to discover a new favorite zinester. I don't understand why Thara Harris isn't more of a zine superstar, not that "superstar" is really a concept that should be associated with zines. But you know what I mean, there are some zinesters that become widely known in our small community for producing well-made, thoughtful, creative, and visually appealing works. Ms. Harris, from West Virginia is one of those writer/artists. Or maybe she does have a rep, and I just didn't know about it for whatever reason? I can't really tell because she doesn't have that much of a web presence.